|
|
April 10, 2004 #
Substitute Teacher Day at The Other Page I don't feel like talking today, so let's just roll the video tape. - - - - - - Bergen awoke to the sound of thunder but it wasn't from the clouds, but rather from the chest of his wife, asleep next to him. She was like a lizard that snuggled itself while sunning, desperate to contain all its body heat -- the down comforter, a thick layer of desert clouds holding in the day's heat. From her chest the sound erupted again. That thunder. Bergen sat upright and nudged himself closer to her. Yes, he thought so. With his nose hardly an inch away, she smelled damp and illicit, like porno magazines his older brother used to hide in the basement when they were young -- magazines tightly rolled up and stuffed among the bric-a-brac of his father's rarely used workshop. His wife chortled again, and Bergen let his hand hover above her to feel the shock waves in the still bedroom air. They tickled his palm with invisible cilia-like protrusions. Quick from years of playing sports when younger, he shot back reflexively when the bolt of lightening screamed from her open mouth. And then the smell of burned ozone. It smelled crisp and bitter. Despite himself, he chuckled as he thought that it would have been quite a sight had it shot from her nose. He tried not to wake her and he inched one leg and then the other out from under the bedding and set them on the cold floor. Cookie crumbs stuck to the soles of his feet, crumbs he had made as he fell asleep eating while reading last night. Bergen had been married to his wife for a bit more than 42 years and the storm had been coming on for months. The first sign of bad weather was last spring when her breathing, which had become heavier than usual, waked him. It had been forcefully and came in the drawn-out, sweeping breaths of someone sighing at eternity. A few weeks later came the rough gurgling sounds from deep in her chest and throat -- guttural accusatory emissions. Sometimes these outbursts had lasted for over 30 minutes and often they would wake him. He was a heavy sleeper but when they happened he had to get out of bed and go to the other room to read until they passed. Bergen plucked at the crumbs with his toes, letting some embed themselves in the fleshy parts of his foot. He brushed the rest into a small mound. They made a little hump on the floor, and with a quick swing of his foot he scattered them again. His wife thundered once more and he braced himself against the bureau for the lightening but this time none came. When they were married decades ago, Bergen had been a much more active man. Now his stomach was soft and his legs showed the roadmaps of every wrong turn. Sometimes he could still be agile, but those were rare. At times he would blame her, but after he had hurled a silent litany of abuses he admitted to himself that it wasn't her at all but rather a festering softness blooming inside of him that he knew had always been there. In the Fall, five years ago, his softness had even gotten him in the wrong bed. Bergen brushed some clothes from the chair by the window and sat down to wait out his wife. The room was beginning to smell even more acrid and Bergen suppressed the urge to cough. His expulsion came with a phlegmatic sputter he held in so he wouldn't wake her. The wind was starting in now and the covers were blowing up and off his storming wife in unfurled sails of linen. He stood up and pulled a blanket down from the top of the armoire to lay it over her. Bergen knew that she would be cold with the blankets blowing up like that and thought maybe one more would supply enough weight to hold the whole thing down. It appeared to be working and he was pleased with himself for his minor engineering miracle. He thought about the diversionary tactics he had created, the vague replies and explanations, the little white lies he had told that Fall. But they had never been that. He knew so. Without them, he reasoned, he wouldn't still be here though. So not the black lies he had been haunted by recently. Perhaps gray, off-white. A disarming middle ground of ambiguity that he had treaded since God knows when. The storm was really starting to kick in now. Bolts of lightening shot in forks from her mouth like a cartoon-snake tongue. They splintered and they stabbed at the air, reaching across the length of the king-size bed. Bergen tried to acclimate himself to the burning, damp smell coming from his sleeping wife but it tainted in his nostrils and made his eyes water. She started crying heavily then. A deluge of rain poured from her eyes and it ran in thick streams through the folds of the bedclothes. 'Damn obvious of her,' he thought to himself, cursing. It pooled up in the indentations his feet made in the thick carpet. It built up around the bed fast. In only a few moments there was an inch of water the floor. The dirt in the carpet was raised up and it floated like flotsam on the rivers that were being created in his house. The wind blew like an exorcism across his wife's chest. Bergen tried to stand but the wind pushed him down in a fierce rebuttal to his shaky old-man motions.
Thunder struck again, and he was jolted by its deafening clap. He cupped his hands over his ears, braced himself for the next one, and waited in terror for the storm to pass.
Archives |
